Stop, Look and Stay Put

Evolution of the life-saving railroad crossing gate and signal

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

In the respective centuries that brought them of age, the railroad train and the automobile both revolutionized the settlement and commerce of the United States. That doesn't mean they should do The Bump.
Even in the days of farm wagons, railroads have endeavored continually to keep trains and non-trains separate. Despite clear trends toward accident reduction within the industry, grade crossings remain its most persistent safety issue. The Association of American Railroads' most recent numbers indicate that in 2005, crossing fatalities rose by 1.4 percent, even while overall train accidents dropped by 12.4 percent. It's a big problem--the AAR says that 97 percent of all rail deaths involve either crossing accidents or trespassing.
Long on the front lines of making crossing safer, Western-Cullen-Hayes Inc. is an industry leader in providing crossing signal hardware. Based in Chicago, its history dates back to 1855. As described by W-C-H national sales manager Carl Pambianco, the firm essentially produces the parts of the crossing gate that you see, what goes up and down, rather than electronics and sensors that make it do so, which come from suppliers. The modern crossing gate can, however, trace its origins to W-C-H's corporate predecessor, the Western Railroad Supply Company, which introduced the first automated gate in 1936. W-C-H's most frequent customer is a Class 1 railroad. A railroad will typically upgrade its crossings in stages, say, 150 of them on a three-year contract at anywhere from $150,000 on up, depending in part on the number of tracks to be crossed.
Today, the company's signature product is the Model 10 gate and signal combination, one of those things in life that's always there but you never really notice. It's built of aluminum, starting with a vertical mast that's up to five inches in diameter. Two alternating flashers with red Lexan lenses are mounted on 12-inch roundels on either side, aided by an electric gong. Reflective crossing signs are standard. The pivoting gates are built to specified lengths from either boxed aluminum or fiberglass. For obvious reasons, the operating system has to be reliably failure-proof. Built-in self-diagnostics ensure that if any part of any system goes awry, however briefly, the gates will come down and stay there until whatever went wrong gets fixed.
Operationally, the mechanical gate functions pretty much in the same way it always has. Basic train detection, in its simplest form, uses a style "C" asserted logic circuit, created by conducting low-voltage electric power through the rails. The federal standard that governs gate crossings mandates that each must provide 25 seconds of visual and audible warning to motorists before the gates come down, regardless of the train's speed or the maximum speed permitted on that particular track. If the train comes to a halt within the warning area and remains stopped, then some systems will rise the gates after a pre-programmed amount of time.
"That way, you're minimizing the delay among members of the driving public," Pambianco explained.

This article originally appeared in the February, 2009 issue of Hemmings Motor News.